Ok, so lets say intelligent aliens that can space travel turn out to be real. What do you imagine they would look like and what would their goals be? What planet would they be from?

Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them] · edit-2 3 days ago

Ok, so lets say intelligent aliens that can space travel turn out to be real. What do you imagine they would look like and what would their goals be? What planet would they be from?

Owl [he/him] · 2 days ago

I'd imagine them to look like some random weird animal. People overemphasize weird sea critters when going down this route; there's plenty of convergent evolution to go around and they might only look as weird as star nosed moles (on a casual glance from the outside; their interior anatomy and bone structure would be weird as fuck).

I don't know why you'd ship actual live beings across interstellar distances. Either implies there's a way around the speed of light, or somebody is really fucking bored. The later is of course more likely.

cosecantphi [he/him, they/them] · 2 days ago

I don't know why you'd ship actual live beings across interstellar distances. Either implies there's a way around the speed of light, or somebody is really fucking bored. The later is of course more likely.

I can see it for the closest star systems to ours, the dozen or so stars within about 10 light years of the Sun. If we can get a spacecraft to 90% of the speed of light, time dilation cuts the elapsed time aboard the ship down to 43 percent of the elapsed time on Earth. The crew would perceive getting to Alpha Centauri in just 1.84 years.